Jori Finkle reports for the Los Angeles Times that John Marciari, curator of European painting at the San Diego Museum of Art, has published an article in the new issue of the Madrid quarterly Ars making the case that an unidentified painting in storage at the Yale University Art Gallery is actually an altarpiece by the Spanish master Velázquez. The journal says the Yale work “could be this master’s most significant find for more than a century.”

At the Yale gallery, the curator of early European art Laurence Kanter calls the discovery all the more remarkable because museums today so rarely have the chance to acquire a work by Velázquez, an enormously influential narrative and portrait painter who was already celebrated and collected in his lifetime.

More than five feet by four feet, The Education of the Virgin shows the young Virgin Mary learning how to read at the hands of her mother, Saint Anne, with her father, Saint Joachim, looking on. Given to Yale in the 1920s by alumni Henry Hotchkiss Townshend and his brother Raynham, the work was previously listed as the work of an unknown seventeenth-century Spanish painter.